Elric exhaled slowly, forcing the tension from his shoulders.
Calm down. Think.
He ran the situation through his mind, stripping away the anger that had nearly gotten him killed moments ago. Hela's necromancy and death magic — formidable as they were — posed no real threat to him. His own resistance to death-aspected energy was simply too high; her domain over the deceased was, for all intents and purposes, neutralized against someone of his particular constitution. Her blades were another matter, but only a minor one. A flicker of his doujutsu could shrink any weapon she conjured before it closed even half the distance between them.
That left one genuine threat.
The Space Stone.
He clicked his tongue. An Infinity Stone. He'd understood conceptually what they represented — but standing across from one in actual combat was a humbling experience he hadn't anticipated. The raw output of that thing was absurd. Offensive, defensive, spatial — it covered every category with contemptuous ease.
Should I just leave?
The thought had crossed his mind. He was honest enough with himself to admit that. A tactical withdrawal wasn't cowardice; it was survival. But the more he turned the idea over, the more unnecessary it seemed. He wasn't in danger of dying. He simply needed to be careful. Methodical.
He activated his doujutsu.
The world shifted in the way it always did — colours deepening, spatial dimensions becoming almost tangible to his perception. He focused the ability inward and shrank.
The moment his form collapsed inward, he saw her move — not an attack, not a pursuit, but something far more irritating. Her hands swept outward in a single, practiced gesture, and a barrier erupted around her body like a second skin. Dense. Layered. Humming with energy that he could feel pressing against his senses even from a distance.
Elric materialized atop a nearby boulder and stared.
...Hm.
He watched the barrier pulse with quiet, rhythmic power, and after a few seconds of observation he arrived at a conclusion that genuinely deflated him.
The energy output of that barrier — per second — was roughly comparable to his own full reserves.
He sat with that information for a moment.
That is deeply discouraging.
Ten minutes passed in near silence.
Hela stood within her shell of crackling energy, eyes scanning the space around her. The battlefield was empty.
"You bastard," she called out, her voice cutting through the air like a blade. "Did you run away?!"
The words had barely left her mouth when a voice drifted in from behind her — unhurried, almost conversational.
"You wish."
She spun.
Elric was sitting on a rock approximately fifteen feet away, one leg crossed over the other, chin resting in his palm. He looked for all the world like a man waiting for a delayed carriage. When he noticed her eyes on him, the corner of his mouth pulled upward.
"Relax," he said. "I'm not going anywhere. Not until one of us is dead." He tilted his head toward the barrier surrounding her. "I can't break through that right now. Fine. I'll wait. How many days can you keep that up, exactly? I'm genuinely curious."
Hela said nothing, but the look in her eyes could have curdled iron.
Elric, for his part, turned his gaze back toward the humming wall of energy and allowed himself a private moment of honest self-reflection.
He'd underestimated the Infinity Stones. That was the plain truth of it, and he was enough of a professional to admit his own miscalculations. The barrier wasn't drawing on Hela's internal reserves in any meaningful way — it was the Stone doing the work, cycling external energy through the construct at a rate that made sustained suppression almost trivial. It was an external object. That distinction mattered.
No one could maintain perfect focus on an external instrument indefinitely. Sooner or later, her concentration would slip. The barrier would flicker. And when it did—
A sneak attack. That's the only clean path here.
It was, frankly, embarrassing to admit. He was not the sort of person who relied on ambushes. It felt beneath him. But facts were facts, and the fact was that her utilization of the Space Stone was already beyond anything he'd seen from Thanos in the movies. Better, even, than what the Mad Titan would demonstrate in the future, which suggested that raw power wasn't the sole factor — Hela was simply more proficient. More complete as a combatant in every measurable dimension.
He filed that assessment away and returned to the question of leaving.
He should leave. The logical case for departure was airtight. There was no strategic necessity keeping him here, the fight had already turned sideways, and continuing to press an engagement against an opponent holding an Infinity Stone was the definition of diminishing returns.
But he couldn't swallow his anger.
It sat in the center of his chest like a coal, and every time he considered walking away he felt it flare hot again.
What he hadn't expected was for Hela to speak first.
"It seems this is the first time we've met." Her voice had changed — not softer exactly, but stripped of some of its immediate venom. She was studying him now. "And yet I feel a hostility from you that goes beyond an opportunistic attack. Did you lose someone to me? A relative? A friend?" A pause. "At least tell me your name."
Elric considered her for a moment.
"If you want someone to blame," he said finally, "blame your future self. Your future version is the one who sent me here."
Silence.
Then, almost immediately after the words left his mouth, a thought detonated in the back of his mind like a thunderclap.
Wait.
He went very still.
If this was the past — and he was increasingly certain it was, not some alternate branch, not a parallel world, but the actual past — then the timeline had a shape that he needed to understand. He was here, now, having attacked Hela. Which meant one of two things was true.
Either he had failed to kill her today, and she had gone on to become the future version who eventually sent him back.
Or—
He hadn't killed her, full stop.
He pressed his fingers to his temple.
Time travel. I hate time travel.
The logic knotted itself into the familiar paradoxical tangle that every serious practitioner of temporal theory eventually encountered. If he killed her now, the future version who sent him back would never exist. If she never sent him back, he'd never be here to kill her. Which meant—
He let out a long breath through his nose.
She probably survives this. Which means I've been throwing myself at a fight I was never going to win, against an opponent I apparently can't kill, out of anger that she provoked in me from an encounter that hasn't happened yet from her perspective.
He stared at the boulder beneath him.
Outstanding.
He looked back up at her, and for the first time since the fight had begun, something in his expression shifted from fury to something more like resigned pragmatism.
"Hey," he said. "What if you just... gave me the cube? We call it even. No hard feelings."
Hela stared at him.
"Do you think I'm an idiot?"
"The offer stands."
Inside her barrier, Hela turned the situation over in her mind with the same cold pragmatism that had kept her alive through centuries of war.
She was talking to him — engaging, even — primarily because her options were currently limited in a way that irritated her deeply. The teleportation magic wasn't responding properly. Even with the Space Stone, she had the distinct and deeply unsettling sensation that something in the surrounding space had been locked — a pressure against the fabric of dimensional transition that made forcing a portal feel like pushing a door that had been nailed shut from the other side.
She didn't know what he'd done, or when, but the effect was comprehensive.
If she tried to force the issue, she had a feeling something would go badly wrong.
So she couldn't run. She could fight — her offensive capabilities remained intact — but every attack she'd thrown at him had failed to connect. He simply wasn't there when impact should have occurred, fading and reappearing with maddening consistency. Her blades passed through empty space. Her spells detonated against nothing.
And meanwhile he sat on his rock, watching her like a patient hunting cat.
As for his claim about her future self — that was nonsense. Obviously. The kind of story you told a child to make them lower their guard.
She filed it away as irrelevant and focused on the problem of the dimensional lock.
The air changed.
Elric felt it first — a subtle distortion in the spatial fabric of the battlefield.
Then the light came.
It descended in a cascade of prismatic colour, brilliant and unmistakable — the Bifrost, the rainbow bridge of Asgard, cutting through the sky above them like a divine column and slamming into the earth of the battlefield with a concussive crack that shook the ground beneath their feet.